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The King of Pain

No one knows how to push through a bad patch better than Scott Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners in history. But recently, Jurek has endured a string of painful setbacks that have him questioning everything—even if he wants to keep running.

It is the first weekend of October, an overcast, chilly day, and one of the most accomplished and confused long-distance runners in the world is preparing to run in circles for 24 hours. He wants to discover who he is.

There is a fat man at the starting line, and a violently limping woman with what appears to be cerebral palsy. There is a husky middle-aged man with a back brace that contains a large American flag and a sign that says “Freedom isn’t free.” There are, as will become clear soon, self-immolating sprinters and carefree walkers, stolid joggers, and grimacing shufflers. At the northwest edge of the course is a small army of camping tents and tables groaning with vitamins and energy drinks and cookies, pasta, sushi, and unrecognizable foodstuffs. This is where the crews for the runners will stand and shiver and chat and sleep (and, in one case, nearly come to blows) until tomorrow morning.

The race is the NorthCoast 24-Hour Endurance Run, and it takes place in Cleveland, on the shores of Lake Erie, on a flat concrete path nine-tenths of a mile long. One hundred and seven competitors will circle the track for one day, and whoever completes the most laps, wins. The winners will receive $900.

There will be no fields of wildflowers to beautify the effort, no jagged cliffs or eerie desert landscapes—all terrain the great runner has traversed before. There will be no earthly beauty to help him forget what is at stake. Instead, there is a short, skinny little guy going for a world record at 100 kilometers. There’s another fat man wearing a helicopter beanie. There is a tall, gangly bald man who survived cancer and is running to raise money for cancer research. There is a smiling, voluptuous blonde who looks like a 1950s pinup model, and who elicits a disdainful “She’s got an attitude!” from an iron-jawed female Romanian crew member working for the favorite in the women’s division.

Men and women who race at distances longer than marathons— also known as ultrarunners—are by reputation and reality a strange, obsessive, and somewhat socially awkward lot. Among ultrarunners, those who choose 24-hour races around flat paved tracks are acknowledged to be the weirdest of them all. Even though serious athletes have shown up for the Cleveland event—the short, skinny guy is Mark Godale, who holds the U.S. record for running 24 hours; Connie Gardner has placed in the top 10 in prestigious trail ultramarathons—no one at the event approaches the stature of the runner trying to find himself. The confused champion’s presence here is akin to LeBron James competing in an AAU dunk contest at a suburban garage hoop.

The night before, trying to explain why he chose this bizarre-even-by-the-standards-of-bizarre event, he said, “I wanted to find the perfect tool to pry me open and see what I was made of.”

At 9 a.m., a race organizer says, “Okay, now we’re going to have the national anthem,” and then, a few beats later, “no we’re not,” and the runners head off. In the middle of the pack, the great lean runner, steady, stolid, not overly graceful, sets out, on his way to what should be redemption and the ease he has certainly earned but has such trouble accepting.

How the feature appeared in the April 2010 issue.

Millions of people, from schoolchildren to overweight joggers, can run a mile in nine minutes and 20 seconds, and doubtless hundreds of thousands can hold that pace for a half-hour or more. Extend the range to the marathon, and the numbers shrink, but still, 26.2 miles at a 9:20 pace is hardly remarkable, something that many thousands of people can do. Double the marathon, though, then double it again. Add steep climbs over rocky paths. The numbers shrink. Turn up the heat, and plunge the course into frigid darkness. Now there are few nine-and-a-half-minute milers left. Add shrieking headwinds, and dusty canyons and icy rivers and exposed mountain ridges and what you have is the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-miler that has 41,000 feet of ups and downs, and scores of men and women facing not just thirst, and hunger and fatigue and unforgiving terrain, but each other, and more daunting, themselves. At the end of the race, you’re left with exactly one human being who can sustain a 9:20 pace.

His name is Scott Jurek, and he is a physical therapist by training, a carefree, boundlessly optimistic athlete by reputation, and, especially within the long-distance running community, alpha among alphas. He is 36, stands 6’2”, and at 165 is lanky and handsome, with clear hazel eyes and ringlets of brown hair framing his chiseled, oddly angelic face. He is the only runner ever to win the Western States seven years in a row, from 1999 to 2005. (His course record, set in 2004, was 15 hours, 36 minutes, 27 seconds, an average of 9:21 per mile.) Other runners revere him for his accomplishments but love him because he is the only champion who stays at the finish line of every ultramarathon in which he competes to greet every finisher, to congratulate them, to thank them for running. He is the only American ever to win Greece’s Spartathlon, a 153-mile race from Sparta to Athens (he won that in 2006, 2007, and 2008). He is the only person to win, in the same year (2005), Western States and the fiendish 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon that begins in Death Valley.

“A pure racing animal,” wrote Christopher McDougall, in Born to Run, the best seller published last year. “The top ultrarunner in the country, maybe in the world, arguably of all time.”

That book, a paean to barefoot running, aboriginal innocence, and pure, uncorrupted speed, is based on strange events that unfolded in 2006, when Jurek traveled deep into the myth-shrouded Copper Canyon of Mexico, to challenge a member of the equally myth-shrouded, hallucinogen-gobbling “Running People” tribe of Indians called the Tarahumara. Jurek’s 50-mile footrace with Arnulfo Quimare, the fleetest and most noble of the Running People, formed the narrative spine of Born to Run, and his performance (and McDougall’s depiction of it) expanded Jurek’s modest fame, which earned him corporate backers and a sponsored blog, offers to help develop a training shoe, requests for coaching and speaking gigs. He also has an agent and a cowriter for his book-in-progress, which will recount his running exploits, exhort people to eat vegan as he does, and generally champion his simple, healthy approach to life.

What Born to Run doesn’t mention is that after the race, Jurek’s wife left him to be with another runner. It doesn’t mention that the dissolution of his 12-year marriage propelled Jurek, a man already inclined toward introspection and self-criticism, into a spiral of doubt and that lately, the man known for always winning isn’t winning. It doesn’t mention that neither the champion’s difficult childhood, his astounding capacity for physical pain, nor his embrace of long-term suffering prepared him for the rewards that now seem to be his, or for his recent failures.

How does a man achieve more than almost anyone had ever achieved in his chosen field, and then, at the instant he seems to have it all, seem to lose the will to achieve more? Is it because of delayed shock waves from a lonely youth, shock waves he had never felt before because he had been so busy running from them? Was it the sudden end to his marriage? Or were Jurek’s difficulties the inevitable consequences of a life devoted to difficulty and struggle? For all his triumphs over hard earth and hard men, was ease the most impossible challenge of all?

He grew up five miles outside of Proctor, Minnesota, about 10 miles from Duluth, an eternity from anything approaching luxury. His father was a teamster, his grandparents “stubborn Polacks.” The boy shoveled snow and pulled rocks from the family garden and he mowed the lawn and chopped and shoveled wood to heat the family house. There was no allowance. When Scott and his sister, Angela, three years younger, and his brother, Greg, five years younger, wanted money, they would make and sell lemonade. There were no new bicycles. For Christmas, Scott would gather pinecones to make wreaths. As a young child, nothing was easy, but nothing was difficult, either. A fish doesn’t know the meaning of wet. Things just were.

Awareness slithers into this rough Eden on a bright summer day. He is playing baseball, standing in high grass and a fly ball is falling toward him and he catches it and throws it toward home plate. He is 9 years old, has just graduated third grade, and he is playing leftfield for his Little League team under a vast Northern Plains sky. As he throws, the little boy sees his family car pull into the parking lot and when it stops, he watches his mother get out of the car and stumble, and he watches his father catch her and help her navigate the 100 feet to the bleachers. That’s the first time he notices that she is having difficulty walking. That’s the moment he learns what struggle means.

Housecleaning and caring for his mother are added to Scott’s daily chores, and by the time he is a sophomore in college, she has been moved to a nursing home.

Scott didn’t complain. He didn’t say much of anything. No one in the family did. Not his father, who had served in the U.S. Navy for four years and handled difficult tasks by “putting his nose down and doing it.” Not his mother, who never spoke of her illness. Certainly not his two siblings. What could they say? “In my family, we didn’t have a lot of conversations about stuff,” he says. “There was just this idea that you do things you just don’t want to do. From an early age, that was pretty hammered into me.”

That approach was tailor-made for athletics. He focused. He worked hard. And while he hoped that the focus and work would pay off, they didn’t. So he focused harder. He ran on the crosscountry team, farther than anyone else, and longer, but it didn’t seem to help. Other guys called the quiet boy names (“Jerker” being one of the kinder ones) and taunted him. They threw mud at him, then sprinted away, and he couldn’t catch them.

The fastest runner in the area was named Dusty Olson, a loud, bawdy, apparently carefree young man. The quiet, dutiful Jurek revered him. The two ran together, and skied together. Olson led, Jurek followed. When, after graduation, after Olson won the junior nationals for Nordic skiing and a regional cross-country championship, and asked Jurek to join him in the Minnesota Voyageur 50-Mile footrace, more than twice as far as Jurek had ever run, the shy, introverted young man agreed instantly.

Jurek had made himself into a “decent runner” by then, a solid college cross-country team member at Duluth’s College of St. Scholastica, where he enrolled in 1992. But he had never won a big race. He had never come close to replicating his hero’s feats. Which made what happened next so unexpected.

In the middle of the race, Olson’s shoe came off in the mud and Jurek passed him. By the time Olson had his shoe back on, Jerker had found his own pace. A new pace. Was it a reward for all that focus and hard work? He beat his hero by five minutes, finishing second. Dusty didn’t beat the Jerker much after that.

The more serious Cleveland racers eat every few laps. When one woman offers her husband— a grim, scowling man—a cookie on the third lap, he knocks it out of her hand and screams “Pretzels! I said pretzels! How many times do I have to tell you?” As he rounds the bend, she yells something at one of her four children who, while Mom searches for pretzels, exits the tent and kicks the family dog. One fat man says, as he’s shuffling through lap two, “Hey, how much time do we have left?” and a few onlookers smile wanly.

The pretzel guy screams at his wife about every four laps, and a crew worker at a nearby tent says, when people raise their eyebrows, “He loves his wife. I run with him every weekend.” The blonde pinup walks every third lap or so, and her smile is dazzling and she looks like she’s just here for a lark and sometimes she holds hands with her husband, which drives the chiseled Romanian crew member to make some nasty cracks about the meaning of athletics and femininity and poseurs who would be better off staying out of races better suited for serious athletes.

The wind comes up and drizzle starts and the runners keep at it, and the great runner continues, not impressively fast, not too slow. On a gray, damp noon, Jurek is in fourth place.

TASK MASTER Jurek has been paced through some pretty hairy experiences by his childhood friend, Dusty Olson. / Photograph by Justin Bastien

While in college, on lunch break from his part-time job at a Duluth, Minnesota, running-shoe store in a mall, he ordered two McChicken sandwiches at the mall’s McDonald’s. Standing behind him was a pretty blonde who worked at a men’s clothing store on the same floor. They got to talking, and talking some more, and before long, they were dating, then traveling together, then married.

Jurek and Leah married in 1995. By then, he was working on a master’s degree in physical therapy, running the occasional 50-miler, working hard, training hard, and when a physical therapy job came up in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1998, the young couple moved there. Soon after Jurek arrived, the two physical therapists he had come to train under both left town, so Jurek found himself working in the local hospital, on the pediatrics ward, going on home visits, all of it alone. It was harder, and lonelier, than he had anticipated.

“I brought my unhappiness with my job home,” Jurek says. “I was overstressed, overworked. It took a toll on my relationship with Leah. It was a difficult time.”

Running certainly helped. Every day Jurek would take off into the prairies, gambol through fields of echinacea. On weekends he would drive to Wyoming and stride through the Big Horn Mountains. He entered one ultramarathon, and then another and another. He maxed out his credit card to travel to races in different states. “It was a really tough time,” he remembers. “Between the job and the relationship stuff, the highlight was running into the hills…”

Later, after he became famous, people would say he used running as an escape, that he literally fled from life’s difficulties. He understands the theories but doesn’t agree with them.

“I wasn’t trying to run from my problems,” he says. “Throughout my life, I’ve tried to meet challenges head on, not escape them. Running and taking off to the mountains and hills and trails was a way to escape the difficulties and emotional strife in my life, but at the same time, I didn’t use it as an addiction or total escape. It allowed me to forget about things for awhile, but it helped me, too. Running and ultramarathoning helped teach me how to handle life situations. Running 100 miles allows one to get through tough moments in one’s life. If someone can run a 100-mile race, a 50-mile race, a marathon, that gives them confidence that they can get through other difficulties in their life.”

Perspective would come later, though. In the autumn of 1998, he was overworked, stressed, and confused. He had his long runs, but felt lost. Was this the reward for focus and hard work? Jurek was thinking that he had bigger things in store for him than being an overworked physical therapist in a town called Deadwood. He just wasn’t sure what. He and Leah moved back to Duluth in November, and he took a job in a ski shop. He decided he’d win Western States the next summer. He had already set a course record in the Minnesota Voyageur Trail Ultra and finished second in California’s Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run, but he’d never won anything as important as Western States.

He spent the winter of 1999 waking early to run up snowmobile trails. He switched to a vegan diet. Not for training purposes, or for world-saving reasons (those would come later), but because he saw his mother’s illness and how his dad tended toward her, and he had witnessed all kinds of suffering in hospitals during his internships and suspected it may have been diet related.

He won the event in 17:34, leading from start to finish, and he won for six years after that. Just before his first victory, the couple moved to Seattle (he had visited once and loved the mountain trails), where Jurek did physical therapy work and helped a friend set up a running-shoe shop. He trained hard and ate well, and at each race he was cajoled, screamed at, and accompanied part of the way by old friend and now ubiquitous crew chief Dusty Olson. With every Western States victory, his fame grew. Brooks hired him to consult with athletes and to help design their shoes. Green Foods hired him as a consultant and to raise awareness about healthy eating. He and Leah traveled to races together, and she crewed for him, and when he wasn’t racing, they skied together, and backpacked, and rode their mountain bikes to the local markets, where they would stock up on vegetables to cook together. The trouble in Deadwood seemed far behind them.

He had discovered two purposes. The first was running. The second was promoting the gospel of simple living and nutritious eating. If by winning races, he could help others live more healthily, and happily, he’d be doing both. He had found his path. All he had to do was stay on it, keep moving.

At the 2005 Badwater, after 70 miles in Death Valley, Jurek started shaking, and vomiting, then collapsed onto the roadside. For 10 minutes, he didn’t move. Then he got up and shattered the course record.

The next year, Jurek returned to Badwater, to defend his title. This time, it was worse. After 21 hours of running, Jurek arrived in Lone Pine, at mile 122, ahead of Akos Konya by 15 minutes. Jurek stopped. He was hot and exhausted. There was a 13-mile climb to the finish in front of him. He didn’t think he could hold off Konya. What was the point?

The point was to feel the pain, to see the path, and to keep moving. He knew it, but he couldn’t do it.

Jurek had lost his way before, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but through hard work, and focus, and belief in the redemptive powers of just forging ahead, he’d been saved. Jerker’s head snapped up, and the two friends tore uphill together, and kept running until Jurek had won his second straight Badwater.

In 2006, he journeyed to Copper Canyon, where he took on a man as pure-hearted as he is. (Jurek returned in 2007 and defeated his Mexican rival, an event not mentioned in Born to Run.)

He won Colorado’s Hard Rock 100 Endurance Run (which many ultrarunners consider to be tougher than Badwater) in 2007, setting a course record, and his second Spartathlon right after that.

In Seattle, he trained and plotted ways to help more people, and expanded his vegan/simple living/corporate spokesperson proselytizing. He was something of a rock star in the city’s running community, a recognizable figure at clinics and on trails and at trendy vegan restaurants, where people (especially women) would cast shy, sidelong glances his way.

If you stuck to the path in front of you, and kept moving, even when things were hard, especially when things were hard, things would work out.

In February 2008, his wife told him she was leaving.

“She didn’t necessarily say to me there was somebody else, but yeah, the truth of the matter is she did leave. There was somebody else; she left me to be with somebody else.” She’d fallen in love with another runner, a man Jurek had met on his first trip to Mexico, a man who’d come into Leah’s life through Jurek.

It was hard, and it was unexpected, and he did what he had learned to do when hard, unexpected things happened. (Though he eventually left the country for four months to do so.) First he entered the 2008 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a 103-mile trip around the base of Mont Blanc, through Switzerland, Italy, and France. He arrived in Europe one month before the race, and focus and hard work backfired. He dropped out when he injured his right knee, because he had overtrained. But what else was he supposed to do? He started training again almost immediately after his injury. A month later, he lined up for his third Spartathlon, and won, finishing the 153-mile course in 22:20, maintaining an 8:45 pace.

Shortly after his return to Seattle in October, he went to Ashland, Oregon, where, according to the rumor mill, he was washing dishes, logging huge, solitary distances, and trying to figure out his life. (The only parts that were true were that he spent some time in Ashland and he was confused.)

He was confused about what had happened to his marriage, to be sure. But also about his future, and his running. Running wasn’t an escape anymore. It wasn’t fun. He loved running, but was tired of the demands that came with it, the e-mails and calls, the requests to show up at this race and that. Running had been a way for him to get away from things and get closer to who he was. Maybe he needed a break from running. Maybe focus and hard work weren’t magic. Maybe they were the problem.

In February 2009, he called upon a shaman in Seattle. He told her about the breakup of his marriage and how he was considering some time off from running. He told her that he had always wanted to inspire people, but he didn’t think he was anything special. He wasn’t that fast. He wasn’t such a big deal. What made him think he could ever inspire anyone? Maybe what he was doing was frivolous. Maybe he needed to quit, for a while or for good. Couldn’t he slow down? Would that be okay?

“You’re a leader,” the shaman told him. “You’re a teacher, you have to keep doing that.” But the shaman had also said, “You want to do this long walk, why haven’t you done it?”

Did the shaman mean Jurek could quit running and help people in another way, or did she mean that he should take some time off to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, which he had always wanted to do? Or was she talking about another race that would bring him more fame, more opportunities to help people? He didn’t know. (When it comes to shamanic advice, who does?) He just knew he was worn out.

Some days he just wanted to go work on an organic farm in New Mexico. Some of his friends noticed his mood, and he would tell them, “I’ve got my mojo back” and try to believe it, but he really thought, I’ve got to simplify my life more. I need to check out.

He couldn’t, of course. Focus long enough, work hard enough, and checking out turns into a very difficult, frightening feat.

Jurek failed to win Western States in 2009, dropping out at mile 48. He skipped the Spartathlon. He flew back to Europe, with his new girlfriend, Jenny Uehisa, whom he had started dating about a year after his wife left, and placed 19th in the Ultra- Trail du Mont-Blanc (in fact, he was passed by two women toward the end of the race). And then he came home to the apartment he used to share with his wife and he wondered what to do.

He put together his book proposal on healthy eating and exercise. He thought about the shaman, and the mysterious long walk, and he decided he would try something that would catapult him to the top again, and in so doing, connect him with the hunger and drive he had somehow, somewhere lost. Sometimes you lose your way. He just had to take the next step. But what was the next step? Where was it? He picked Cleveland.

Dusk has fallen on the oddballs pulling themselves around the little patch of land next to Lake Erie. It has fallen on the guy screaming at his wife, and the woman with what looks like cerebral palsy, and the man with the beanie and the rest of them, or at least those who haven’t dropped out already. It’s 6 p.m. and Jurek is still going, but he’s hurting. He wants to quit. He doesn’t think he can make it.

He has considered quitting during other races, and has faced far more grueling conditions. Heat and cold. Ravines. This is the man who has conquered mountains. There’s no mountain now, just a flat, endless circle, chilly, crepuscular gloom, and the oddballs and tents. And Jenny. And Jurek’s flaccid mojo.

Jurek understands the inadequacy of gauging success over short distances, of judging a person’s spirit in a straight line. He comprehends in a way most people don’t how greatness can only be measured over long distances, along paths marked by setbacks and little defeats that only become crushing as they pile up. He knows that, but still, knowing is one thing. Pain is another. At 50 miles, walking a lap with Jenny, he tells her that his legs hurt, that it was a mistake to try this so soon after Mont Blanc.

She reminds him that the night before he had said what he loves is testing himself, and that he should do it and stop bitching. But his legs feel like crap, he says, they really hurt! She says, so they hurt? Get over it. Stop walking after this lap, then start running again. And oh, yeah, does she want to send someone to get some Vagisil to rub on his legs?

He starts running after that, but just a couple of laps later, he slows down. She yells as he passes. “Go, Jerker. Go, Jerker, go!”

“I’ve seen him come back from the dead before,” she says to an onlooker. “I saw a videotape of Badwater. He was vomiting, then he came back strong. I know he can do it. He’s gotta do it.”

Two laps later, he’s walking again. “My legs!” he moans.

“C’mon, Jerker,” she shouts as he limps past. Then, to an onlooker, “Tell him he ran so slow at Mont Blanc that he got chicked twice.” (That’s racing lexicon for being passed by a woman.)

As dusk turns to darkness, and as some runners put on headlamps, Uehisa laments. “I don’t know what to do. He told me I should tell him he can do it.” (Then she deadpans, “All I know is he promised me a new pair of jeans with his prize money.”)

She tries everything. She tries “pouting, tough love,” but nothing seems to work. There’s one thing she hasn’t tried, the thing that has saved the champion before. She’ll try it now.

The night before the race, Jurek and Uehisa sit down to dinner at a Cleveland restaurant called Johnny Mango. Another champion might be staring into the mid-distance, considering everything he had to gain in the morning, everything he still had to lose. Another runner might be discussing strategy, contemplating pace and nutrition. Jurek is wondering if he should be running at all.

“Sometimes I wonder, am I being selfish? Running ultramarathons is a pretty selfish thing. It feels good to motivate people to run and take care of their bodies. But I wonder, am I serving a greater purpose? You think people can’t afford food. People say it’s expensive to eat organic, to eat healthy. I want to educate people how to eat. What could I do?”

He worries that maybe he hasn’t trained enough for this race, has never even set foot on the course. He says that’s due in part to his unexpected failure at Western States and his spur of the moment decision to try Mont Blanc. Also, he spent last week in Oregon at a funeral for a friend, another ultrarunner, who had killed himself. No one had even known he was depressed. That shook Jurek. That made him think about what a man’s life meant, about the secrets people kept from each other. His friend had been focused. His friend had worked hard. The event turned Jurek, introspective by nature, positively Hamlet-like.

“There are a lot of times it’s just not fun,” he says. “It’s a lot of discomfort. There must be something I’m searching for.”

Uehisa, an avid climber and runner, and a designer for Patagonia clothing, is jester to Jurek’s gloomy Dane. When Jurek wonders, “Is my motivation to shut people up?” she shouts, “I want him to shut people up.” When he notes that not many big-name runners have shown up for the Cleveland race, she says “that’s because it’s boring.” She calls him a “big dork,” and has been after him to wear tighter, more fashionable clothes. She says he makes her breakfast and packs her lunch every day they’re together. She says she “hit the jackpot in boyfriend land.”

Jurek smiles at her, and blushes. He takes a bite of his tofu red curry with brown rice. They talk about what a nice surprise it is to find such tasty vegan food in Cleveland. Then it’s back to soulsearching. “Am I losing drive and focus because I’ve accomplished so much? Or is it something else? Do you keep doing it because it’s habit, or because there’s nothing else? Is what I’m doing the best that I can do?” He looks up, at his girlfriend and a reporter, both silent and staring at him.

“I shouldn’t be talking like this the night before the race.”

DUTIFUL SON Jurek visits his mother, Lynn, who has battled multiple sclerosis for more than a decade, in January 2010. / Photograph courtesy of Scott Jurek

When Jurek visits home, his father, who weighs about 300 pounds and has never seen Scott race, serves ham. Over dinner, family members complain that the Native Americans, whom they don’t call Native Americans, are shooting all the deer and ask what’s wrong with the runner, why isn’t he eating any ham? On every trip, Jurek visits his mother in the nursing home. His parents divorced in 1995. Watching his parents’ marriage fail was bad. Watching his mother’s body fail her was worse. “Yeah,” Jurek says, “those were deep valleys. Those were canyons.” When he gets tired running, and he hurts, it’s not so bad. He’s endured worse.

Multiple sclerosis has in the past year affected his mother’s vocal chords, so that he has trouble understanding her on the phone. He calls in the mornings, before she becomes incomprehensible. Even most mornings, she’s difficult to understand. She repeats herself more lately, and her short-term memory is worsening. She’s bound to bed and wheelchair, and can only use her left arm and hand. She lacks the strength to use a remote control, so Jurek helps her when he visits. She has difficulty swallowing, and is only supposed to eat pureed foods, but her son takes her to Red Lobster every time he visits, because it’s her favorite, and he chops up her favorite dish, shrimp scampi, until it’s almost pureed, and they agree to keep that a secret from the nursing staff. They always go to a movie theater together (she loves Julia Roberts) and then he’ll drive her back to the nursing home.

Because she loves bingo, he plays bingo with her, placing all the markers, and he tells her stories—”My travels, what I’ve been doing, simple things, and she brightens up.”

They talk about movies and Julia Roberts and bingo, and after he kisses her goodbye, and after he gets to the Minneapolis airport, and after he is settled back to his running life in Seattle, where people admire his courage and comment on his drive, he’ll worry. He’ll worry that he’s not training hard enough, that maybe he’s not logging enough miles. He’ll worry that he could be helping more people. He’ll worry about whether he’ll be running in 10 years, about whether another life—he’s not sure what kind of life, he wishes he had a clearer picture of it—represents a more noble choice than what he’s doing now. He’ll worry about being true to himself. But always—no matter what his worries, no matter how glorious his triumphs, or crushing his losses— he’ll think of his mother. He’ll worry that he’s not a good son.

Jenny calls Dusty in Minnesota, and begs him to talk to his friend. But Olson declines. “I’m sick of being his bitch,” he says, which seems funny when Uehisa recounts the story, but takes on a darker cast when I talk to Olson a month later. “It’s been a long road for me,” Olson says. “I actually have a faster marathon time and a faster 100K PR than Scott does, but not a lot of people know that.” Regarding his role in helping Jurek to ultramarathoning fame, Olson says “the first few years were a lot of fun, and then he started doing multiple races, and then it started being almost a part-time job, committing a month a year to help out someone else’s running career.”

Jurek wishes Olson were here in Cleveland, to crew for him as he has done at so many big events. “I don’t know,” Jurek will say later. “It always seemed like he was having fun. He’s been instrumental in my career, but at the same time, I don’t think he’s been clear to me about how he felt…Maybe he’s starting to self-reflect, thinking, What do I want to do?

“I think he feels like maybe he’s been in my shadow a little bit,” Jurek continues. “But I haven’t got a clear statement from him. I’ve always told him, ‘Hey, I’ll gladly pace you at a race.’ But he didn’t really want to do that. I thought he was happy being part of what I was doing. Why did he keep doing it? I haven’t figured it out.”

There’s so much he hasn’t figured out.

Night falls and the champion complains and says he’s going to quit and his girlfriend yells at him and encourages him. Consider the runner, at rest, in defeat. Or is it defeat? Is he done, or just done for now? No one moment can provide the measure of a man. The champion knows that, and so should we all. A man—especially a man who runs ultramarathons—can only be evaluated over the long haul. A single moment is seldom what it seems. Instances that seem easy are hard, and the greatest triumphs follow the most painful lows.

It is late summer, and he just sat down to dinner at a vegan restaurant in Capitol Hill, the tidy and fashionable Seattle neighborhood where he has lived for 10 years. It has been three years since he first ran against the mystical Indian in Copper Canyon, a year and a half after his wife left him. The failed assault on Mont Blanc is next week and his struggle in the park by Lake Erie won’t take place for two months. He signed the divorce papers this afternoon.

He ran 30 miles today. He’ll run 20 tomorrow. He is wondering how long he wants to continue running, and toward what end. That is not a spectacularly weird thing to wonder, especially for any person who has labored at the same task for such a long time, and with so much intensity. But for Jurek watchers, including readers of Born to Run, ultrarunners, and this writer, the champion’s obvious self-doubt can give rise to all sorts of speculation about inner turmoil and emotional trauma and the fragility of greatness. That might not be fair. And might not even make sense to some, who see his sponsors, his attractive new girlfriend, his life getting paid to do what he likes to do, and wonder what all the hand-wringing is about. But the speculation and second-guessing are there. Jurek knows it. He wonders about his clarity of purpose as much as anyone.

“A lot of people want to see the champion go down,” he says. “You’ve got to have ego to be at the top. I wonder if I have that anymore...” His voice trails off.

To succeed as an elite athlete, a certain arrogance is required. That fact, combined with the hours and hours dedicated to maintaining the skills and strength necessary to perch atop a savagely steep pyramid of other driven competitors, means that most champions possess neither the inclination nor the vocabulary to discuss their doubts and fears, at least until their careers are over. Jurek is an exception. Or his career really is over. Or has he just hit a rough patch, bound to emerge more revered than ever?

“I think he’s always been a conflicted guy,” McDougall says. “I think he’s always struggled to figure out who he is and what he should do. I think the success came by accident and the clarity was never there. I think he started to win and he thought, Oh, this is who I am. I think [now]…he’s not winning and he’s wondering who he is.

“Scott always felt that if he stuck to the pure way, the Zen way, the art of the warrior way, he would get everything he wanted. His approach was, you get out there, you run the races and win the races. You tackle all the hard cases and you dominate them, then in the end you will be the hero. And what he found is the opposite. He raced everyone. Everyone! From Greeks on their home course to the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico to winning Badwater and Western States within two weeks of each other.”

“And what did he get? His wife left him. He lost his best friend. No huge endorsements. So no, I don’t think he has that clarity of purpose anymore.”

Jurek has only skimmed Born to Run (“If I read everything written about me, I wouldn’t have time for anything else”), and when told that its author says Jurek’s Zen approach to running has left him empty, the ever-polite champion politely demurs. “I’ve definitely done it more pure, but that’s the way I was raised. Prove yourself by getting out and doing it…I’m more of the mind, do it and they will come to you.

“I’m known for focus,” Jurek says, “but sometimes I wonder. How’d I win Western States seven years in a row?

“That’s a cool thing about a 100-miler,” he says, though he might as well be speaking of a man’s life. “It’s how you deal with adversities and challenges. You have time to shape your destiny. You have time to rebound.”

One of the fastest and most courageous, and unquestionably the most obviously self-lacerating runner around is asked about what he gets from running, and what his legacy will be.

“I keep wondering why I’m going back,” he says. “Maybe for getting a glimpse of my soul. At the moment, though, I’m hitting the pain and discomfort. That’s where you have to think about guts, or spirit, or the soul. Something more than the mind or body.”

Chances are Jurek’s psychic distress has something to do with a distant father and a ghost of a mother. Partly it’s because he is a restless sort, and has never enjoyed success as much as the work it has taken to achieve it. Doubtless it’s due to the breakup of his marriage. Certainly it’s because whatever compels a man to run through desert heat and frigid cold and exhaustion and cramps also turns periods of rest and what’s supposed to be relaxation into nuanced and complicated propositions.

“I’m not the flashiest,” he says. “I can put my head down and keep going, relatively hard for a relatively long time. So what? I can run 100 miles pretty fast. Do many people want to do that? I can run a long distance at a pretty fast clip. Is that special?”

Well, yeah, his dining companion suggests, yeah, it’s something incredibly special, if he’s doing it faster and longer and for more years than anyone else in the world. That’s pretty freaking special.

No, the champion says, the visitor is missing the point. Running fast and running far is not about winning. It’s not about money. It’s not even about suffering, or redemption. It’s about discovery.

“It’s about finding one’s path,” the emperor of despair says. “It’s about using experience in life to shape something completely different. That’s the art of living.”

This is the moment when from the gloom emerges luminous salvation, when clarity of purpose returns. This is the instant where Jurek regains his mojo, rises from fatigue and despair, and then shatters the distance record for 24 hours and reclaims his spot as the brightest star in the bright, shining firmament of all distance runners. He has done it before and now is the moment when he should do it again. This is the point in the saga of Scott Jurek where everyone forgets about mythical, mystical Indians from Copper Canyon and panting desperados in Death Valley, and all the snarling challengers who, no matter how they try, are always bested by this agonized, noble champion. This is the part where a failed marriage is forgotten and a troubled soul is healed, where winning makes everything all right. Except that it’s not that moment. It’s 7 p.m., and the champion’s legs hurt, and he doesn’t feel right and he doesn’t have the energy to go on. He has gone 65 miles and he stops. He quits. Just like that. It is a simple, unheroic end to a simple, oddball race.

Uehisa calls a friend for a ride, and when the car arrives, she and Jurek gather their belongings. It is 7:30 when the champion limps across the grass infield of the track, carrying bags of vitamins and food and ice and a hotel ironing board that had served as Jenny’s table and office.

The next morning Jurek will return to the race, to be there at the finish as always, to lend support and a few kind words to those who complete this strange event. (The gangly cancer-survivor places third in the men’s division. The blonde pinup wins the women’s division. The Romanian crew member has to be separated from another crew member, after they start screaming at each other in the dead of night; Mark Godale, going for the 100K mark, drops out. The guy yelling at his wife drops out; a few age-group records are set). Later in the day, Jurek and Uehisa will visit Cleveland’s art museum and eat more vegan food and take it easy. And then they’ll fly home to Seattle, and on the flight Jurek will worry about all the fuel being burnt, if he’s a hypocrite for flying so much while he’s talking about living a simpler, nobler, smaller-carbon-footprint kind of life, and once he lands, he’ll worry about his future. In the early evening, though, in the dim light of a cloud-enshrouded, barely visible full moon, another racer—still plodding along—recognizes Jurek’s lanky frame and shouts out.

“Hey, sorry about your injury!”

Jurek looks toward the voice and tries to put cheer in his voice. The champion has always been beloved for being supportive of the slower, the more easily fatigued, and the less gifted. He is good to his mother, and he is good to those who seek to beat him. He is kind to everyone but himself. Is his response an example of the champion’s lifelong noblesse oblige, or a plea from a man from whom so much is expected?

“Hey, don’t worry about me,” Jurek says. “Do this for yourself.”

Story Update · November 24, 2016 A month after this story ran, Jurek ran 165.7 miles to set the U.S. 24-hour distance record at the IAU World Championships, a mark that stood until 2012. In 2012, he published his autobiography Eat & Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness, in which he detailed his transition to veganism; the book became a New York Times best-seller and vaulted him to vegan icon status. In 2015, he broke the Appalachian Trail speed record, completing all 2,189 miles of the historic route in 46 days, eight hours, and seven minutes. “It didn’t surprise me to see Scott set the AT record,” says writer Steve Friedman. “He gets a lot of personal meaning out of pursuing these ambitious goals.” (Karl Meltzer broke that record in September; Jurek helped crew him.) Jurek has since retired from competitive racing, and in June, he and Jenny (now his wife) had their first child—a girl named Raven. “In some ways fatherhood is similar to running an ultra with the sleep deprivation and all these constantly changing variables,” Jurek says. “I’ve really been embracing it. I definitely have my ‘dad’ 10 pounds on me.” Perhaps, but he’s still logging 40- to 50-mile weeks, and recently hiked 21 miles of the Grand Canyon with Raven strapped to his chest. He’s working on a book about his experience on the Appalachian Trail, and is plotting yet another big athletic endeavor, this time with his family. “Jenny is game for it,” he says. “The way I would put it: I’m currently in the inspiration phase.” –Nick WeldonBack to Top